


His Father's Son

by Jenwryn



Series: The Meg AU [9]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, Future Fic, Gen, Next Generation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-11
Updated: 2007-04-11
Packaged: 2017-10-02 06:33:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenwryn/pseuds/Jenwryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Atlantis has become a settlement and the first-borns are now teenagers. What happens when you're fourteen and everyone hates your father?</p>
            </blockquote>





	His Father's Son

Nathan sat on the top-most step in the gateroom and rested his head moodily against the edge of the glass-and-metal railing that circled the upper level. He was fourteen years and three months old. Apparently – so everyone kept telling him in those fake-hearty voices that he hated – it was never easy being fourteen at the best of times. He knew all the clichés by heart – that it was hormonal, that they were growing pains, that what didn’t kill you made you strong. But when it came down to the hard facts of reality, despite all the clichés, nobody gave you any leeway because of it. It was like all the excuses were there but you never got to use them. And he was sure that none of the other kids had it as hard as he did.

Just for a start, they were the children of heroes... and they knew it. And knew that _he_ wasn’t. He was just Nathan.

Technically, kids weren’t allowed in the gateroom without their parents, and even then they had to be there for a reason. A whole sector of the city had been opened up for them to run wild in after the expedition was officially made a settlement – they didn’t need the gateroom too. But Doctor Weir had smiled at him and said that so long as he kept out of the way, she’d make an exception in his case. He was still in two minds about that. On the one hand, he knew it was proof that she felt sorry for him, which he detested, and it was also just one more thing to set him apart from everyone else his age. But on the other hand, the gateroom was his most favourite place in the entire galaxy, and he couldn’t help himself but spend every spare minute there. He loved the way the sunshine streamed in, the way the walls rose up, the way that the stargate sat proudly there in the centre of it all. He loved being in the middle of the quiet bustle of so much activity, liked to pretend that he was part of it.

And then of course, there was Doctor Weir.

He sat with his head against the glass, dull blonde hair flicking down onto his glasses, and watched her. She stood, like she so often did, with a laptop tucked under one arm and her slender fingers wrapped around a cup of coffee, talking to one of the gate technicians. Something the man had said made her laugh, and Nathan breathed in the sight. He didn’t think she laughed anywhere near as much as she should. It made her so beautiful – the way she tossed back her hair, eyes gleaming. A few weeks ago, she’d had her hair cut short around her ears and up until now he’d been unhappy with it, but as he watched her laugh and saw the way the curls bounced merrily, he decided suddenly that it was fantastic.

_Everything_ about Doctor Weir was fantastic. At fourteen, he couldn’t have said clearly even to himself if he found her more attractive as a woman, or as a mother figure, but either way he knew that he idolised the ground she walked on and had done so ever since he could remember. It didn’t matter that she was obviously unobtainable – his wasn’t unrealistic admiration; he knew she was married, knew that she could never possibly look at him as anything other than one of the kids. But that didn't matter. Nor it didn’t matter than she was no longer young; didn’t matter that her dark hair (how many hours had he spent trying to name that exact shade?) had streaks of silver through it. He thought they looked beautiful. When Aggie Beckett declared loudly that _her_ mother had said that Elizabeth Weir should take a leaf out of her husband’s book and get some hair dye, Nathan had launched himself at her in righteous anger – launched himself even though he knew that she was the toughest kid in the city (barring Arno Dex, obviously) and it was a certainty that she’d beat the crap out of him. Which she did.

No, none of that mattered. But two things _did_ matter.

One was that somehow, unbelievably, impossibly, she was the mother of Jebadiah Weir-Sheppard. Nathan couldn’t comprehend how that had happened. He would lay awake at night and pray to the rosary beads his mother had left – even though he didn’t know the prayers and wasn’t even sure whom he was praying to – that there might be some way he could take Jeb’s place. He both hated and admired Jeb; and most of all was scared of him. Jeb called him a weasel and a sniveller and would steal his glasses and hold them out of reach until finally one of the McKay girls, or maybe Evie, would overcome her giggles and take pity on him, and get them back for him. He _hated_ it when they took pity on him. He hated it even _more_ when they giggled. No - Jeb simply didn’t deserve Doctor Weir as a mother.

The other thing that mattered was Nathan’s father. His father who would sit at the dinner table – even on the rare occasion when they actually ate in the Central Mess Hall with the other families – and complain ceaselessly about her at the top of his lungs. It made Nathan want to crawl under his chair, especially when he knew she could hear. What if she thought that he felt he same way about her? Once, his father had made him repeat aloud all the problems with the way that Atlantis was run, right there, with everyone watching. He’d been so ashamed that he’d kept away from the gateroom for a whole week.

But he couldn’t stay away any longer than that. It wasn’t just because of Doctor Weir. It was the very room itself. The gateroom was the beating heart of the city. And if there was only one thing that he loved more than Doctor Weir, it was Atlantis. He was deeply and incurably envious of the kids that had been born there - Jeb, the McKays, Aggie... Nathan thought of Atlantis as a person. Sometimes he wondered if, when he prayed to the rosary, he wasn’t really praying to the city instead. The walls seemed alive to him. He would cringe when his father started banging cutlery and declaring that he’d had it up to ‘here’ with the way he was treated, and the fear that they might leave would stop Nathan’s jaws from working till he couldn’t eat.

The simple thought of leaving Atlantis made him physically ill. He couldn’t trust that one day his father wouldn’t make the threat of leaving a reality – he knew that he’d already done that once, back before Nathan was born, back before his father had met his mother. He’d only returned when Nathan’s mother had left, returned because the pay was better and he could leave the boy in someone else’s care for days on end. Nathan knew with certainty that he was a terrible disappointment. He had no idea that in a normal school on Earth – a planet he had no memories of – he would have been considered brilliant. He could only see that compared to the children of heroes he was plain, and pale, and stupid. He didn’t even have the ATA gene; when Jeb locked him in a transporter, he couldn’t get himself back out again. The fact that his mother had vanished and left him with nothing but her grey eyes and her rosary just confirmed it for him. When he looked at the dog-eared photo he had of her, it never occurred to him to imagine that she might have left because of his father.

The gateroom was the only place that he felt whole. It was the only place that he could melt his mind into the city and be nothing but a living, breathing fragment of Atlantis. That was all he wanted to be. Better that than pathetic little Nathan Kavanagh.


End file.
